


The Very Wine of Blessedness

by thearrogantemu



Series: The Splintered Light [6]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Drinking, Fourth Age, Gen, Reconciliation, Very Long Conversations, What About The Oath Though, aman - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 13:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11990775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thearrogantemu/pseuds/thearrogantemu
Summary: Sweet are the summers on the plains of Yavanna Kementari, and dark hang the clusters of grapes in the Yulmanore, and red is the wine that flows from those happy vineyards. Seldom have mortals tasted such a liquor, which is poured out for the guests of kings, and carried in fair vessels by hands of their sons and their daughters, and flows freely at the great festivals of the Blessed Realm. To some it brings grief and to others gladness of heart, some it inflames to madness and some it lulls to sleep, but to all it brings, for a time, release from care; and shows forth clearly what lies hidden in the heart.“No,” said the High King of the Noldor.“Youshut up.”





	The Very Wine of Blessedness

**Author's Note:**

> This is a coda to _And What Happened After_ ; without having read it, it may be somewhat unclear what Frodo and Sam are doing in a story about Feanor and Fingolfin finally talking out their grievances.

Sweet are the summers on the plains of Yavanna Kementari, and dark hang the clusters of grapes in the Yulmanore, and red is the wine that flows from those happy vineyards. Seldom have mortals tasted such a liquor, which is poured out for the guests of kings, and carried in fair vessels by hands of their sons and their daughters, and flows freely at the great festivals of the Blessed Realm. To some it brings grief and to others gladness of heart, some it inflames to madness and some it lulls to sleep, but to all it brings, for a time, release from care; and shows forth clearly what lies hidden in the heart.

“No,” said the High King of the Noldor. “ _You_ shut up.”

The two eldest sons of Finwë, whom strife had divided in Valinor before the Sun, were deep into their second bottle of _sercemna,_ the Earth’s-Blood of the upper hills of Loanore. [1] The excellent wine had loosened both their tongues. It had begun to do strange things to Fëanor’s sense of grammar and syntax; he slid between dialects and leapt up and down registers of formality, inventing words when he could not recall one that fit his purpose. Fingolfin, on the other hand, found himself slipping into the simplified language of childhood, all basic forms and plain direct constructions.

The fire was burning low in the grate, and the people of Nerdanel’s halls had all dispersed, some to sleep and some to their night-work. Fëanor was lounging crosswise across his chair with both feet dangling over one side, and Fingolfin considered the insolent grace that his brother still managed to retain deeply unfair and possibly a sign of poor character. He himself was attempting to maintain both dignity and sobriety, but as the one faded, the reasons for retaining the other grew less and less persuasive. He clapped both his hands on his knees to emphasize his point; he could no longer remember quite what it was, but he could remember, at least, that it was important not to concede it to his brother.

“Ah!” Fëanor returned, sounding much less drunk than he ought to. “So then upon this question you take the position of the post-removalists[2], that the creator himself should not be considered the authority on his works? _Shut up_ , you would say to the author of the argument? Wise-Finwë, in this at least you were well-named, for I agree with you -- as you should know, for did you not take up the authority that I laid down?”

Since his return unlooked-for from the Halls of the Dead, tempered at least somewhat by sorrow and by the weight of the world his deeds had shaped, Fëanor had renounced his claim to the kingship in favor of his brother, and thrown himself back into the work that he loved, to language and craft and the endless inventive labor of mind and hand. He had revived the art of communication over distance, had completed three lexicons on languages that had sprung up since his death (including the first Valinorean study of Westron[2a], the common tongue brought over the sea by the returning Exiles), and most of all was was occupied by studying the sundering of the world and how it might be healed. Though he had never been attended by peace and quiet, even the most ardent among his returned followers had accepted his decision.

Instead, the controversies that followed him now were those of the scholars of Tirion, who had promptly fissured into two warring camps over whether Fëanor ought to have any say over the interpretation of his early works, many of which had formed the basis for entire schools of thought. It was the latest turn in these debates -- an anonymously penned essay called _The Once and Future Author_ arguing that a work must be considered as separate from its creator -- that had begun the brothers’ debate that night. Fingolfin had immediately recognized it for Fëanor’s own work, despite its stance being the diametric opposite of what he had once advocated, and suspected that he was doing this purely to trap his supporters in paradox.

“You -- can’t _do_ that!” Fingolfin had made the mistake of attempting to parse Fëanor’s rebuttal, which as far as he could tell amounted to refusing his point on the grounds of agreeing with him.

“It’s remarkable,” said Fëanor, with the same spark in his eye that Fingolfin remembered from Finwë’s supper-table with his older brother explaining some new discovery to the guests. “You can actually spot the moment, the exact moment, when your self-control is neutralized by the wine; it’s like adding drops of guide-moss [3]to a solution - drip - drip - drip - _ye!_ and the blue’s gone red. I knew it!” He let his head fall back and laughed aloud. “I knew it was feigned, that calm excellence of wisdom--”

“There is a difference,” said Fingolfin, with great dignity, “between _feigning_ and _working at something._ If I, unlike some of my kin, can hold onto my temper for more than five breaths together, this is because I have practiced, from my earliest youth, at bearing up under fierce provocation.”

“Wisest of the Noldor, thy subtlety is not so smooth as the serpent yet, thy word-craft shows its seams and joinings! Why I could believe, brother, half-brother, that might have been a dart aimed at me.”

“Forgive my obviousness,” said Fingolfin, refilling his glass exactly halfway. “I haven’t done this in a very long time.”

Fëanor laughed again and pulled himself halfway up in the chair. “What, insult me? Or get drunk and proclaim discomfiting truths? You were never a word-spilling drinker, Nolofinwë, not even when the Weaver’s Day fell in the midst of the Poldorean Games.[4]”

It was true. Intoxication among the Eldar was practiced voluntarily, and by custom, for particular reasons on particular occasions, for a taste of sacred and temporary madness. In the days of their youth in the light of the lost Trees, Fingolfin had never dared risk loosening his guard upon his tongue, and, as far as he could tell, Fëanor had never placed such a guard in the first place.

But long ages of the earth had gone by since those days, and they were at ease, at last, in each other’s company. So now Fingolfin sat with his older brother before the hearth in Nerdanel’s halls, where since the return of the last of his scattered sons from the shores of Middle-Earth, Fëanor’s family had been reunited once more.

In Nerdanel’s estate also, the mortals from beyond the Sea had made their home, delving into the terraced hillsides like badgers. Fingolfin, who had long made a habit of seeking counsel with his steady-hearted sister-in-law, had also taken to seeking them out on his visits. He prized their counsel, strange as it was, and took pleasure in talking of the lore and customs of the peoples of Middle-Earth with the one, and the challenges of civic administration (and most recently, some interesting uses for fried potatoes in breakfast recipes) with the other.

“We shouldn’t drink this all,” said Fingolfin, eying the row of bottles on the wall. “I mean to carry some with me to Estonath.” After his stay in the Oromar Sarnaherion, he would be continuing northward, and carrying greetings from both families to Maedhros and to Fingon, who lived in Estolad Eledhronnath, the Exiles’ Camp. Nonetheless, he got up, selected another bottle, and placed it between them on the low table. 

On this one point at least, Fëanor could not bring himself to needle his brother. “You and I,” he announced, “may have had our quarrels, but that son of yours is a credit to you.”

“His courage is undeniable, though his judgement is questionable,” said Fingolfin, shaking his head, “but he has his heart’s desire at last, I suppose.”

“Our own reconciliation is made well-nigh superfluous, since your children and mine, Nolofinwë, are all at peace-work, having evidently taken it upon themselves to resolve in their persons the strife that sundered our families.”

“Aye.” Fingolfin had observed it; the friendships strained and broken over the course of the War of the Jewels renewed and blossoming in Aman. “Not only our firstborn, you know. Irissë and her son are much in the company of your wild Turkafinwë. I would not have guessed he would have such a healing influence on my grandson, but I cannot quarrel with the lightening of his spirit. Perhaps she will be more fortunate in ranging the forests with him than she was in the tangles of Nan Elmoth.”

For the first time that evening, he seemed to have struck his brother speechless. “This is not,” said Fëanor, recovering himself, with an evaluative glance at their glasses, “enough wine for such news. Pray you, refill the cup for me.”

He waited until Fingolfin was actually in the act of pouring the wine before he added, “And our mothers.”

“Our mothers what?” Fingolfin set the bottle down without the slightest indication of unsteadiness in his hands. 

Fëanor considered. In formal _parmaquesta,_ the classical book-Quenya that even in the days of their youth before the exile had been a written rather than a spoken language, he began. “ _She who was Miriel Therinde and is Miriel Vairendur hath been seen by night and by day at the house of Indis --_ ”

Fingolfin, in the act of returning to his chair, sat down more suddenly than he had intended. “She -- _what?_ Are you certain?”

“There are already songs about it. _And moon-pale Miriel comes by night/To the arms of the sun-warmed queen...._ ”

Fingolfin looked very blank. “I need,” he said, “a great deal more wine.”

He had never met his father’s first wife; knew her only from legend and legacy and from the shape of the space that her absence carved out of her people and her son. But now, in these days of long healing, it was generally known that Miriel the Broidress, whose death had shattered the peace even of the gods in untroubled Aman, had returned, after a fashion, to the world she had abjured forever. Few had seen her; she spent most of her time with Vaire the Weaver, the Power of History and Time, and passed like one of the Holy Ones in and out of the Halls of Mandos. Those who glimpsed her spoke with fear of her iron eyes and her gentle hands. But Fingolfin knew that Fëanor and his mother had spoken much, both within Death and without, though what they said to each other was nowhere recorded, even in the webs of the Weaver herself.

“I suppose,” said Fingolfin faintly, drinking without looking at his glass, “it’s been a long time since I was last in Valmar… but songs? Already? Well, there’s no reason this isn’t… we know remarriage can _happen_ … ”

Fëanor, having evidently had sufficient time to cope with this news, refilled his glass and enjoyed Fingolfin’s discomfiture. “Remarriage? By the transitive property of Finwë, they are married already.”

Fingolfin drank.

“I would like you to know,” said Fëanor, “that there are a number of remarks I could append here about how it feels to have a parent remarry. I am, however, refraining from appending them. Out of consideration. For your sensibilities.”

Fingolfin drank.

“The displacement,” Fëanor went on. “The doubt. The way that the foundations of Ea itself seem to be shaken. A parent, after all; one of the unchanging pillars of the world; now changed, changed so deeply as to be re-partnered. If parallel lines were suddenly found to meet, or lodestones to pull West instead of North, it could be no more bewildering.” He looked for Fingolfin’s reaction. “But to point all this out might have seemed like gloating,” he added. “Which would have been unnecessary.”

Not until the green glass base of Fingolfin’s wine cup shone through the dregs of the dark wine did he raise his head, his expression schooled to quietness.

“Tell me the truth,” Fingolfin said. “Did you ever do anything but despise my existence?”

Fëanor appeared genuinely baffled by the question. “What -- you --”

“There’s no need for that puzzled look, brother. You made it perfectly clear you wished I had never been born. I understand why. I understood why even at the time, not that it changed anything between us. What I want to know -- now that you’ve had the chance to think about it -- would it have helped? Would you have been happier, if I had never been?”

It might have been only the effects of the wine, but to Fëanor it seemed that the room had shifted around him, tilting like a ship.

“Do you know how much I looked up to you?” Fingolfin went on. “Do you have any idea how much I wanted you to value me?”

This was hardly fair. “I --”

“And then you, _for some reason,_ decided that value was a sliding scale with you at one end and me at the other and that any acknowledgement of my existence had to be drained directly from your lifeblood.”

“I --”

“I am not finished, Feanaro!” The thunder in his voice was very nearly that which had roused nations and driven armies and echoed from the gates of Angband itself. He paused and considered. “Well,” he said more quietly, once again the grave King of the Noldor, “the rest is largely of a piece with what came before, but I am not finished with _that._ ”

Fëanor, with some effort, kept his mouth shut. Fingolfin noticed, but refused to let himself credit his brother for a courtesy so elementary. “I remember what you said to me. _One who seeks to be the master of thralls._ That was the worst insult you could think of! It didn’t seem to matter whether it would sink in, whether it would hurt me, whether it had anything to do with what I was actually doing.” He swirled the wine in his glass, watching the motion of the liquid. “I suppose you don’t need that sort of precision when you have a sword…”

His eyes came up, meeting Fëanor’s over the glass. “I knew you were listening, that day in Father’s council. I didn’t know that you were armed, of course, but who would bring a sword to a meeting? It was you I was addressing, as much as Father. _Two sons at least thou hast to honor thy words._ ”

He sighed. “You know, I suppose that’s the difference between us. You called me the worst thing you could think of. I called you what I knew would hurt you most.”

Fingolfin peered more closely at the face that so resembled his own. Fëanor had never had much of a choice in whether his face showed his thought, a trait he had passed to some, though not all, of his sons. “Why, look at you. It still hurts. Even after everything, it still hurts…”

Knowledge of how to hurt his proud brother had always come so easily to him; his very existence, half the time, had seemed to do the trick. He saw, as if looking down on his own actions from a great distance, that he was still doing it, instinctively as breathing, hurting his brother by calling his attention to the fact of his hurt.

He caught himself. Even apologizing, at this point, would be pressing again at the sore spot.

“You have hedged me round with your weaknesses, brother,” he said, more to himself than to the one beside him. “I have offered you mine, but in this as in all else, you are determined to outmatch me...”

Fëanor got up, his lips pressed together, but standing steadier on his feet than he had any right to at that point in the evening. Stooping by the hearthside, he tossed another log onto the dying fire. A word to it, and the flames leapt up merrily around it. A chill in the air had been settling in as the early spring night wore on, but at the renewed fire it drew back. Fingolfin stared into the flames, his glass untouched in his hand.

“Why,” Fingolfin said. “ _Why did you die?_ ”

Fëanor sat back in his chair and placed both feet up on the table. “I assume you’re not unfamiliar with the mechanics of it,” he began, in his best lecture-hall Quenya. “In my case it was because my body had been damaged too badly to contain --”

Fingolfin made a suggestion for what Fëanor could do to himself, using a Sindarin so demotic that Fëanor paused in interest, trying to parse the profanity. “I couldn’t confront you. I couldn’t even bury you. You just -- weren’t there.”

“Oh stop whining. It wasn’t very pleasant for me either --”

“Shut up. We are not talking about you, we are talking about me. My chance for justice was thwarted, my hope of reconciliation was crushed, my brother was killed, Fëanor; you _died,_ and you shouldn’t have done it!”

“An excellent suggestion! If only I’d thought to mention it to the balrogs!”

“Some of us have more sense than to pick a fight with a whole nest of them!”

“But not more sense than to pick a fight with that _ungwegorno_ [5] by yourself!” In one motion, with the grace of a released spring uncoiling, Fëanor swung both his feet down off the table and leaned forward, shouting in what had begun as annoyance but ended as rage, deep and helpless and red-hot. “ _Morgoth,_ Nolofinwë; he killed my father, _our_ father, and you gave yourself to him! What did you think would happen?”

Fingolfin was a lord of his people, skilled in battle and wise in council, who did not quickly rise into anger or fall into despair. But now he slumped back, all his anger doused, suddenly more profoundly sad than he had ever allowed even his closest counselors to see him, let alone his proud half-brother. “That was different. I was -- done.”

He let his head fall back against the carved wood of the chair, closing his eyes. He had walked back across his despair in the Halls of the Dead, cold and endless as the Ice he had crossed in his life, but on the other side of that despair there had been work and not peace: work and sorrow and a troubled land.

“Fëanor,” he said, not opening his eyes. “How do tell your children that you are sorry?”

“Art asking what manner of thing an apology might be?[6] I am flattered, but the wine hath already begun its work upon thy vaunted judgement if thee seemeth such counsel may be found from such an one as I.”

“The wine has begun its work,” Fingolfin retorted, “upon your ability to recall which language you are speaking, and for your information I chose my source of counsel advisedly. I thought that you, my brother, with all that you have to be sorry for, might have more experience in this matter, so lead me and tell how to say to my children _for all that happened to you, for all you suffered because of me, forgive me. Forgive me for not being able to save you._ ”

Fëanor’s response was to refill his own glass to the very brim.

“I have,” he said after a moment, “passed that felicitous point of intoxication where I can readily command the language that would convey to you the debt that I owe to your son.”

“That _you_ owe -- oh.” Fingolfin at first had not seen the connection. But Fingon had refused to return from Mandos until he could bring Maedhros with him to the living world, and the years in the Halls had grown long as the ages of the World rolled past, and still Maedhros had waited in the darkness, and Fingon had waited beside him.

“I could not help him,” said Fëanor, staring into the dark liquid, and Fingolfin knew that he was now speaking of his own son, his firstborn and the last of his children to leave the Halls. Maedhros Self-Slain, whose abdication had given Fingolfin the High Kingship, and whose deeds were written in blood across Doriath and Sirion. “Maybe I could have once, but after the end…”

“I left him,” said Fingolfin, looking into his own glass, unconsciously mirroring Fëanor’s gesture. He spoke, as if to himself, of his own children. “I left them, my sons, one with my broken kingdom and one with my broken body. I knew what I was doing when I rode on Angband. What it would do to them.” He raised his eyes and found Fëanor looking across at him. “How could I not? I remembered how it felt when I learned about Father. There wasn’t even the time for grief, then; we were all so worried about _you._ You fled into the darkness and we thought -- we thought you might die, you might do violence upon yourself --” He stopped, belatedly. Fëanor’s thoughts were still on his self-slain child, and on this point, at least, he had no wish to hurt him.

“When I returned from death,” Fingolfin said, “I sat with Arafinwë on a night like this, after he had yielded me the crown. If you have never seen Arafinwë drunk, it’s a stranger sight than Arafinwë charging into battle, and one about as rare. He challenged me to a game of darts, gave himself a haircut, and then demanded to know why Father hadn’t done more to stop what happened between us. Between you and me, that is. Back when all this began. I couldn’t say then, but now I think I know. Why Finwë never stepped between us.”

“Well, the Valar pre-empted him,” Fëanor interjected.

“Did they? No, brother, I can say it if you cannot; Finwë chose not to see the trouble in our hearts, hoping that whatever was between us would heal and not fester, that he would not have to rebuke you, not have to counsel me, not have to see that the wound was of his making. That was not wisely done.” Fëanor was clearly disposed to object, but Fingolfin raised a hand as if to hold back the words. “Cannot our king and father have done some ill in his life? We have not been so wise, after all, towards our own children. They suffered because of us; we could not save them from what we had done.”

The log in the fireplace, which had been bright with leaping flames, was now nearly consumed. Its core flickered beneath the charred black surface, red and gold.

“And yet,” said Fëanor quietly, “they were saved.”

Neither of them spoke. After a moment the log fell into fragments, which glowed among the ashes of the hearth.

“We have better sons than we deserve,” said Fëanor.

“Well,” returned Fingolfin, “you do at least.”

As he had hoped, this roused Fëanor from the darkness of his thoughts. “I alone, Nolofinwë? Why, when did you come soaring out of the darkness bearing hope in your arms, borne aloft by one of the eagles of the Elder King --”

He caught himself, but it was too late. Fingolfin did not even need to say to a word to remind him of the circumstances under which he had encountered the eagles of Manwe.

“You really did walk right into that,” he said, as Fëanor covered his face and groaned. “That was entirely your own doing.”

“Or that of the Valar.” Fëanor was trying to recover himself. “Ever too late to save -- if they were going to send one of the lesser gods of the air to your aid, they might have sent him before your fall and not after it--”

“Don’t think you’re going to get out of this by calling upon the Valar! No, brother, you’ve set me on this path; we’ll follow it to the end. Did you think your death was the worst of the grudges I held against you? I told you that I would follow where you led; you led us all to murder, theft and murder, murder and theft and treason, and my people after me.”

The neck of the bottle rang against the edge of the glasses as Fëanor refilled them once again.

“So it’s that time of the night, is it?”

Fingolfin glared at him. The fire had burnt out entirely, but the heat still radiated from the stones of the hearth.

“I have answered to Olwë. You know that, brother. As I recall, you were there, and our sister.[7] Didn’t even our sunny-hearted brother drag himself back to the court for the occasion?”

“I’m not Olwë; I don’t want your answer to Olwë; I want your answer to me. I told you I would follow where you led.” Had he said that already? The words echoed in his thought; he had been saying them since before the Sun first rose. “You led us to Alqualonde.”

Fëanor, uncharacteristically for him, considered before he answered. He brought the wine to his lips, but set it down without drinking. “There is a clarity to Fate,” he began. “You know your path as surely as water does when it runs seaward. The Oath may have made things even clearer in that respect; when the first agony had burnt itself off I knew exactly where the nearest way to its fulfillment lay.”

“As a needle charmed by a lodestone remembers the North.”

“You do understand.” Fëanor’s smile vanished as quickly as it appeared. “And Alqualonde - that was the easiest way forward. You knew that as well as I, oath or no oath. The heart’s will is surely less obdurate than the hills of ice--”

“And insulting Olwë to his face is the surest way to turn the heart’s will! You make me remember what it was to hate you.”

Fëanor drank. “Do you remember,” he said, “the words that I spoke to the Powers, on the night that the Light was taken?”

“Do I _remember?_ ” His brother glared at him. “Do I _remember?_ Curufinwë Fëanaro --”

Fëanor did not wait for him to finish his expostulation. “ _If the Valar will constrain me, then shall I know indeed that Melkor is of their kindred.”_

“Yes, the Noldor used it that as a war cry on the way North! I remember our people, _my people,_ shouting that back to me, thousands strong, as if the earth itself had spoken, as if the winds and waters all cried out. Fingolfin beat his hand against the table to the rhythm of that distant cry. “ _If they constrain us, they are Morgoth’s kin._ ”

“We are not talking about you, we are talking about me,” Fëanor snapped. “The Valar could have stopped me, overpowered me, torn from me by force the works of my heart. They could have chosen to be Morgoth; a council of Morgoths. And that was not what they chose.

“Nolofinwë - it was what _I_ chose.”

He set down his glass.

“It was years before I saw it. Ages. Arda itself had been sundered before that knowledge came to me, opening in my mind as simple and sure as a geometrical proof. I hated Morgoth - who more than I -”

Fingolfin thought better of opening his mouth at this juncture.

“--and I pursued him, and I fought him, and I bound myself to vengeance upon him -- and I chose to become him. By force I chose to tear from my kin the works of their hearts. As Morgoth gave my Art to the hungry darkness, so I gave theirs to devouring flame. _Then I shall know indeed that Morgoth is of their kindred.”_

“You did,” said Fingolfin slowly, “and that was not a choice you made alone. We became killers for you.”

“For yourself,” Fëanor retorted, cutting him off. “You had the chance to keep your hands unstained. Our brother took that chance. He -”

“Did you think we weren’t going to defend you?” The anger in Fingolfin’s voice was showing through now.

“We all made our choices,” Fëanor said, “each for himself --”

“And the choice that you gave me,” Fingolfin hissed, “was to stand aside and see my brother killed or to kill in his defense.”

“In my defense? Nolofinwë, you were defending not me but what I carried; my father’s crown, the crown you believed should be yours.”

Fëanor paused, set his glass down on the table, and straightened his posture in the chair. Now there was nothing of carelessness in his manner or his deportment. Except for the wavering light in his eyes and around his spirit, he might have been entirely sober.

“What would you have chosen, Nolofinwë?” he asked, “if it had not been for me?”

Fingolfin looked back at him; the wine that in him fanned his low-burning anger to bright flame did not seem to have the same effect on his brother. Fëanor seemed genuinely curious, and bitterly grieved.

“No, think on your answer. I weave no traps for you, I accuse you of nothing. I want to know. What I did -- was wrong. But if you had been leading, brother, as you wished to be, as perhaps you should have been, what would you have chosen, there on the shores, with the way barred and darkness upon all things?”

Fingolfin drank, and the wine on his tongue tasted of brine and blood. “I asked myself that. What I would have done, if my choices had not all been shaped by yours. Not often, you understand. What might have happened is an exercise for poets and dreamers and the dead. I needed to be who I was; there was no time to spare for regret, and no heart to spare for hypotheticals, and no self left for who I might have been.”

Fëanor leaned forward. “You carried a sword to Alqualonde, a sword that Melkor taught you the forging of. Who did you mean it for?”

“I know what I want to have chosen. To have crossed the Ice rather than shed kindred blood. Even knowing how many of us would die… But I don’t know if I would have.

“I suppose I never will know. Whether I would have been strong enough not to murder. I know I was not strong enough not to turn to thievery, once the murder was done. I cursed you when you burned those blood-bought ships, but not because of what you had done to the Teleri. Because of what you had done to us; what I could no longer do to you.”

In Beleriand he had seen the Edain use wine to dull pain and to blunt the edge of memory. The wines of the Eldar served no such function, unless it was for their power to bring sleep.

“One thing I know: I would not have turned back. And because of that, people would die; my people would die. And their deaths would be on my head. As were the deaths on the Ice, the deaths in Ard-Galen. I led them and they followed. I did not kill them, but they were my deaths all the same.”

There was a strange harsh sound like a cry choked off; Fingolfin looked up suddenly and saw his brother weeping. “I killed my children,” he said, his voice still clear despite his tears. “I gave them the choice that took their choices from them. I made them into weapons, my shining sons. Forged against Morgoth, so I thought. Against Morgoth? Against their people. Against themselves. I killed them. My children -- my children.” And he wept bitterly, covering his face with his hands.

Fingolfin waited, and Fëanor’s distress was so great that he did not even notice Fingolfin’s hesitation. He weighed giving voice to the question in his mind, with prudence on one hand and the wine on the other. The wine won.

“Would you do it again?”

“What part of it?”

“The Oath.”

Fëanor was silent for a long time, resting his head in his hands. Fingolfin was just leaning forward, to see if he could see in his eyes if he had slipped into slumber when he spoke.

“Not -- not exactly.”

Fingolfin waited for him to go on; his brother seemed to be searching for particulars.

“I would,” he said after a moment, “have kept my children out of it.”

Fingolfin leapt to his feet, the world pitching like the deck of a ship in a storm.

“Void take you, Fëanor, you don’t _get_ to keep your children out of it! You didn’t get to keep me out of it, you didn’t get to keep our people out of it, there is no such thing as destroying yourself alone, brother; _I tried._ ”

“I thought,” said Fëanor after a moment, “you succeeded.”

“My people -- my children --”

“What happened to them was Morgoth’s doing. None of yours.”

“I may not have chained any of my children to my ankles when I cast myself into the abyss --”

“There, then you do agree with me --”

“But there simply isn’t a world where self-destruction doesn’t have _consequences._ ” He seized Fëanor by the shoulders and pulled him to his feet. “You would rather have had your father than the Silmarils. Don’t you realize your sons would rather have had you?”

Fëanor made as if to twist away from him and then stopped, swaying, as if he felt for the first time the instability of the wine. Fingolfin gripped his shoulders more tightly.

“You’re not as alone as you think you are. You never have been.”

And all at once he began to laugh, for the joy of it, and the freedom, for his brother returned to him, laughing as if the long sweet summer that had nourished the wine-grapes shone through them both. He laughed so freely that Fëanor laughed with him, and then both were staggering together, helping each other down to the flagstones before the hearth before either one could stumble or fall.

“I mistrust thy embraces!” Fëanor cried through his laughter. “The last time you took me to your heart you struck me such a blow as my jaw remembers yet!”

“I’m pleased you remember something of that, at least!” Fingolfin darted a much less well-aimed blow at his brother’s arm. “You know I had forgiven you long before you walked out of Mandos, though I never expected to see you again to say so.”

Fëanor sprawled back on the hearthstones, laughing helplessly, arms flung wide and eyes closed.

“And yet you came back to the world in the end, for all that it was beyond all hope. And our people are returning to the light,” Fingolfin went on, as if he were making notes for a song, “and our children are finding their way home, and your Oath is now made void!

Fëanor’s laughter ceased. He opened his eyes and looked up at Fingolfin. “Void?” he said. “Void indeed, but no less mine for all that.”

“What do you mean? Brother, you are free, your sons are free.”

Fëanor pushed himself up on his elbows. “Yes, they are free, and for that mercy I could almost count the rest well lost. But my oath is _broken,_ Nolofinwë. I am breaking it now. I break it with every breath I draw and every word I speak. I broke it when I left the Halls of the Dead. I broke it when I raised my eyes to my creation in the heavens -- and let the world take it, and hold it, and keep it. I broke it when I laid down my claim upon my Silmarils, which is my claim upon myself, and yielded to judgement.”

“I thought the judgement was that of the light itself!” Fingolfin was long past sparing Fëanor’s feelings. “You could not press your claim, even if you wanted to --”

Fëanor shook his head. “They will not suffer my touch, but no more can they reject me. They are hallowed, yes, but they are my self and my substance. If I touched them now, I would not burn. They would. Aule said it once; he knows what it is to make and to break… a creator can always unmake his creations, even though the price be his own life. I will not darken the world to save my oath, and so the darkness I called must come for me.”

“The Valar will never hold you to that!”

“The Valar did not make us, they cannot unmake us. But it is not the Valar who hold my oath.” He lowered himself back down and gazed up to the wood-and-plaster ceiling, as if beyond it he saw the bright stars in the Valinorean sky. “No, I am for the Everlasting Darkness, brother, soon or late.”

Fingolfin tried to stand up and thought better of it. He leaned back against the wall beside the hearth, feeling the heat radiate through his back. “This cannot be borne,” he said, and did not know who he was addressing. “I will not endure it. I came to seek you once, only to find my hope turned to ashes in my hands. No, you are for the world again. Aren’t you already at your new great work, to bring the sundered world back into union?”

But Fëanor was still gazing up at the ceiling. “Perhaps this is how it had to end, the song of the Fall of the Noldor. The Silmarils taken up into the Great Design, and I their creator sundered from creation forever. The Everlasting Darkness waits for me. I do not know how long it means to wait. Do not look so stricken, brother! You of all people, know that even though the darkness is coming, there may still be joy before it falls.”

He let out a great sigh and closed his eyes, sleep drawing his spirit like the tide. Fingolfin felt sleep pulling at his own spirit, but could not let this resignation go without protest; it was too close to despair.

“Full brother in heart,” he said. “I will not see you lost to the Darkness; I will not. Let it come in what form it pleases, I will fight for you…”

Fëanor opened one eye. “How would that… even work… usual foolishness.”

But he reached out his hand and clasped Fingolfin’s.

“Brother. Can’t take on… everyone’s troubles.” He slipped back into slumber.

The High King of the Noldor, leaning against the wall, considered pleas, reproaches, remonstrations, but none of them took form. Something came to him, there on the edge of sleep, a rock laid bare by the withdrawing tide. He spoke softly to his sleeping brother, offering not an argument, but only his own story.

“Feanaro,” he said. “I know why the Eagle did not arrive sooner.”

Fëanor’s silence changed; he was listening though he slept.

“I never -- asked.”

* * * *

“Well,” said Samwise Gamgee, over the sounds of the gently snoring sons of Finwë, “I suppose someone had better clear up this mess.”

He was accustomed to joining Frodo in the kitchens for a midnight snack, and on this occasion, the voices from the next room had carried with particular clarity. The two had agreed by unspoken consent to wait for the outcome of the discussion in case their intervention should be required, and had finished off most of the leftover scones while doing so.

Now that silence had fallen, the two of them emerged from the kitchens and as a courtesy to their hosts, began clearing away the bottles. There were a shocking number of them.

“So Elves can get drunk after all!” Frodo said. “I know Bilbo put it in his book and all, but somehow I never thought…”

Sam eyed the two lords of the Noldor with the practiced wisdom of one who has trundled more than one relative home in a wheelbarrow after a particularly festive birthday party. “Well, I’ve seen worse from a family reunion where we tapped the beer-kegs. When Old Halfast[8], my gaffer’s cousin -- no, no, his second cousin -- returned from the Southfarthing, where he’d been all summer, and never a word to Aunt Blossom, and her with a young one coming…”

Sam went on in this vein for some time, while the lords of the Noldor slept on the floor and he and Frodo went about restoring the upended order of the room.

“A fine fellow, the King,” he said, easing his empty cup out of his slack hand to carry it back to the kitchens to be washed, “a good cook, and a good student, which is more than can be said of most kings, I dare say! He’s gotten to be a fair hand at my potato pancakes.”

“Perhaps he’ll make them for breakfast!” said Frodo, laughing, setting an armful of bottles on the kitchen table.

“As much as he’s drunk?” Sam looked at the collection of bottles. “Not likely! I wouldn’t trust anyone in that condition near a fire, and that’s a fact.”

“I think it’s different for Elves,” Frodo said. “Though whether that’s because of what their wine is, or because of who they are, I don’t know.” He took one last look back through the kitchen door at the sleeping Eldar on the hearthstones, and turned back to the table.

“This one’s still half-full!” he exclaimed, lifting one of the green glass bottles. “What do you say, Sam? Shall I pour for you, if we can find a clean cup?”

“Oh, not for me, Mr. Frodo,” said Sam, alarmed. “I have enjoyed a little tipple in my time, but that was only our beer such as we brew in the Shire. I’m sure I don’t know what this Elvish stuff would do to me, or to my digestion, at my age.”

“No harm, I am certain of that!” Frodo laughed. “Come, I mean to try it, and you may join me or drink water, just as you please.” In the clear shallow glasses that he found, the wine looked so red it was almost black

Sam allowed that perhaps he would try a little. “Only a thimbleful. So much as would wet a gnat’s whiskers, as my gaffer used to say. Of course,” he added, swirling the liquid in the glass that Frodo handed to him, and gazing into its velvety depths, “that’s what he’d say before he drained off a pint, so I don’t know what kind of a thing he thought a gnat was.”

He took a sip, and both his eyebrows went up. “Why, it doesn’t taste like wine at all! It tastes like -- well, I don’t know what you’d call that; I’d say it tastes like the day of the first harvest, it tastes like knowing that you’ve made it past the storms and the droughts and the blights and the gnawing creatures, to the harvest at last! But that’s not a taste, at least not outside of poetry. Don’t mind me.” He drank again.

The two of them sat down at the kitchen table in great contentment, and before long, perhaps feeling the effects of the wine, Frodo suddenly turned back to Sam.

“Did he have an explanation?”

“Who?”

“Halfast. Your uncle. When he came back home.”

“Well, if he did,” said Sam, “he had more sense in his head than to give it! No one wants to hear what you thought mattered more than they did. It wasn’t an explanation she wanted from him, anyhow,” he added, after a long moment.

“What did she want?”

“A good man. And it would take more than a night’s worth of drinking and apologizing to show whether or not she had one of those.”

Frodo made a quiet noise of assent, and looked down at Fëanor where he slept.

“But you’re not talking about Halfast, are you,” said Sam. “I don’t pretend to know what Mr. Fëanor was on about, oaths and darkness and all, but he’s not the first one to break a promise and he won’t be the last.”

This was perhaps an overstatement; living on Nerdanel’s estate in the heart of the tale of the oldest wrong in the Blessed Realm, Sam was in fact perfectly familiar with the ill-fated oath of the House of Fëanor. Still, in his heart, he could not quite believe it; it seemed more a matter of song than of the life that they led on the earth.

“An oath is a good deal more than words to them,” said Frodo. “Or maybe it’s that they’re closer to words than we are. He seems to think he shaped the world with it, and I don’t believe he’s wrong.” He drew at his small glass, troubled. “I had no idea he still believes himself condemned. I wish he had told me. Still, perhaps he did, and I didn’t listen. _The One who holds our oath is beyond the world,_ he said, _and no word comes from him.”_

“The Everlasting Darkness indeed!” said Sam. “What is that, I should like to know!”

“Should you?” said Frodo sharply, and Sam looked at him in surprise. But he sighed and sank back against the chair.

“It doesn’t take much imagination to guess, does it? Think of the darkest place you have ever been, and then take everything away, and then take away more than that, and then take away the self that does the thinking --”

“I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life,” said Sam. “Everlasting Darkness! As if darkness were a thing that could last!” He tossed off the rest of the wine and set his cup emphatically down on the table. “And who on earth does he expect to carry out this sentence for him? He’s not going to feed himself to a spider, I suppose!”

“Er, well,” said Frodo, with some hesitation, “The One, I suppose. Eru Iluvatar.”

“Are you telling me,” demanded Sam, with the perfect enunciation that marked, in him, the early stages of intoxication, “that Eru Iluvatar is worse than spiders?”

Frodo had no reply to this, and indeed was not entirely comfortable with the existence of that sentence at all. But Sam’s blood was up.

“I am now,” he declared, “just drunk enough, that I’ll tell you plain as plain, Mr. Frodo, that that’s stupid, and I’ll tell him that’s stupid too, when he wakes up.” He nodded at Fëanor’s sleeping form, draped gracefully across the hearthstones.

“Now, I wouldn’t venture to say anything about this One, but I will guarantee you,” he said, unwilling to be deterred, “that you cannot trick the Creator of the World Entire, the Author of the Great Story, into serving as your personal executioner, just as if the One were Jock Simple of Gowks Row, who bought his own sheep from the shepherd. No sir! Not likely, and you may take your oath upon it! Although,” he added belatedly, “perhaps you’d better not, given what all he was saying about oaths and such.” He picked up his glass and was surprised to find it empty; Frodo silently poured out the last of the bottle.

“Maglor told me something like that while we were on that boat,” said Sam. “The worst of his story, or so he certainly thought it. But I don’t believe for a minute our voices don’t reach to him. The Author not know his own story? Not likely! I don’t know his name, of course, but what difference does that make if he knows mine?”

Frodo considered this for a long time; Sam saw his hand move on the table as if he were writing. “We have all had more asked of us than we were able to give,” he said at last. “We have all received more than we were able to ask. I know that now, if I know nothing else.”

Sam considered this deeply, and with the accompaniment of several more sips of the excellent wine. “Well I don’t know as I can make head or tail of that,” he pronounced at last, “but it sounds like good news, and I’ll take it as such.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. "Year-land"; a sub-region within the Yulmanore - the wine-growing country of Yavanna's realm. Wine grown here is considered to retain and communicate the character of its season particularly well.  
> 2\. The name for the philosophical school that sprang up in the wake of, and in response to, the removal of Aman from the Circles of the World.  
> 2a. Specifically the Westron of the Shire; Frodo is listed as co-author on this particular work.  
> 3\. In our world this is known as _litmus_ and is usually encountered on filter paper; however here as there it's derived from lichens.  
> 4\. These were an extended festival, of which Tulkas was the patron, beginning with athletic feats and concluding with a days-long feast of food and drink. The Weaver's Day was sacred to Vaire and to unvarnished fact. It was a popular day for the solemnization of marriages and other contracts, and considered a day of bad luck for poets and diplomats to practice their trade.  
> 5\. Feanor is coining a term here; what he is going for is “excreta of a spider”. As it happens, the troops of Northern Beleriand developed a very similar insult, _muk ungron,_ so Fingolfin knows exactly what he’s talking about.  
>  6\. Feanor has suddenly lapsed into Proto-Qenya because he is deflecting, and so needs a source of distraction.  
> 7\. Lalwen, who was also at the theft of the ships; Findis was, and is, living a life of solitary contemplation up on a mountain.  
> 8\. I imagine Old Halfast (young Halfast as he was at the time) as the son of Holman Greenhand, son of the Gaffer’s great-uncle Halfred. Holman was a gardener, and the Gaffer took up with “Cousin Holman” in Hobbiton to join him in his profession. Old Halfast had neither taste nor talent for gardening, which may or may not have contributed to his scandalous flight. He and Blossom later settled in the Southfarthing and their children adopted the surname Brewer.


End file.
